Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska--Including Extensive Hitherto Unpublished Passages from the Original Journal / Edition 1

by Rockwell Kent, Doug Capra

Overview

A new paperback edition of Kent's first book, often referred to as "Alaska's Walden."

In August 1918 Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son settled into a primitive cabin on an island near Seward, Alaska. Kent, who during the next three decades became America's premier graphic artist, printmaker, and illustrator, was seeking time, peace, and solitude to work on his art and strengthen ties with his son. This reissue of the journal chronicling their 7-month odyssey describes what Kent called "an adventure of the spirit." He soon discovers how deeply he is "stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world" as man and boy face both the mundane and the magnificent: satisfaction in simple chores like woodchopping or baking; the appalling gloom of long and lonely winter nights; hours of silence while each works at his drawings; crystalline moonlight glancing off a frozen lake; killer whales cavorting in their bay. Richly illustrated by Kent's drawings, the journal vividly re-creates that sense of great height and space — both external and internal — at the same time that it celebrates a wilderness now nearly lost to us.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819552938
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	07/26/1996
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	237
Sales rank:	392,509
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

ROCKWELL KENT (1872-1971) was one of America's most celebrated graphic artists. Although he is perhaps best known for his illustrations for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Moby Dick, his artwork appeared everywhere at the height of his career. Kent also created the "random house" that, despite revision throughout the years, has been the colophon of that company since its inception in 1928. Kent's other travel books include N by E, Wilderness, and Voyaging, all reissued by Wesleyan University Press, a tribute to their perennial appeal. DOUG CAPRA came to Alaska in 1971 and taught school in the Aleutian Islands, in Seward, and at Kenai Peninsula College. He retired after twenty-four years, and then spent seventeen years as a seasonal and permanent ranger at Kenai Fjords National Park. Capra has served on the board of the Alaska Historical Society and written extensively about Alaska history, including three books, several forewords, and many articles about Rockwell Kent published in The Kent Collector. He has spent many years wandering Fox Island and Resurrection Bay to learn more about Kent's experience. Capra's book, The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords, includes two chapters about Kent. He has written and directed two plays, And Now the World Again, about Rockwell Kent; and Into Alaska a Woman Came, about a pioneer woman called Alaska Nellie. He has written the forewords for two of Kent's books published by the Wesleyan University Press—Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska; and Northern Christmas. He lives in Seward, only twelve miles from Fox Island, and occasionally works as a naturalist aboard cruise ships.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

DISCOVERY

We must have been rowing for an hour across that seeming mile-wide stretch of water.

The air is so clear in the North that one new to it is lost in the crowding of great heights and spaces. Distant peaks had risen over the lower mountains of the shore astern. Steep spruce-clad slopes confronted us. All around was the wilderness, a no-man's-land of mountains or of cragged islands, and southward the wide, the limitless, Pacific Ocean.

A calm, blue summer's day, — and on we rowed upon our search. Somewhere there must stand awaiting us, as we had pictured it, a little forgotten cabin, one that some prospector or fisherman had built; the cabin, the grove, the sheltered beach, the spring or stream of fresh, cold water, — we could have drawn it even to the view that it must overlook, the sea, and mountains, and the glorious West. We came to this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer's search; having had vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it.

With less faith it might have seemed to us a hopeless thing exploring the unknown for what you've only dreamed was there. Doubt never crossed our minds. To sail uncharted waters and follow virgin shores — what a life for men! As the new coast unfolds itself the imagination leaps into full vision of the human drama that there is immanent. The grandeur of the ocean cliff is terrible with threat of shipwreck. To that high ledge the wave may lift you; there, where that storm-dwarfed spruce has found a hold for half a century, you perhaps could cling. A hundred times a day you think of death or of escaping it by might and courage. Then at the first softening of the coast toward a cove or inlet you imagine all the mild beauties of a safe harbor, the quiet water and the beach to land upon, the house-site, a homestead of your own, cleared land, and pastures that look seaward.

Now having crossed the bay thick wooded coast confronted us, and we worked eastward toward a wide-mouthed inlet of that shore. But all at once there appeared as if from nowhere a little, motor-driven dory coming toward us. We hailed and drew together to converse. It was an old man alone. We told him frankly what we were and what we sought.

"Come with me," he cried heartily, "come and I show you the place to live." And he pointed oceanward where, straight in the path of the sun stood the huge, dark, mountain mass of an island. Then, seizing upon our line, he towed us with him to the south.

The gentle breeze came up. With prow high in the air we spanked the wavelets, and the glistening spray flew over us. On we went straight at the dazzling sun and we laughed to think that we were being carried we knew not where. And all the while the strange old man spoke never a word nor turned his head, driving us on as if he feared we might demand to be unloosed. At last his island towered above us. It was truly sheer-sided and immense, and for all we could discover harborless; till in a moment rounding the great headland of its northern end the crescent arms of the harbor were about us, — and we were there!

What a scene! Twin lofty mountain masses flanked the entrance and from the back of these the land dipped downwards like a hammock swung between them, its lowest point behind the center of the crescent. A clean and smooth, dark-pebbled beach went all around the bay, the tide line marked with driftwood, gleaming, bleached bones of trees, fantastic roots and worn and shredded trunks. Above the beach a band of brilliant green and then the deep, black spaces of the forest. So huge was the scale of all of this that for some time we looked in vain for any habitation, at last incredulously seeing what we had taken to be boulders assume the form of cabins.

The dories grounded and we leapt ashore, and followed up the beach onto the level ground seeing and wondering, with beating hearts, and crying all the time to ourselves: "It isn't possible, it isn't real!"

There was a green grass lawn beneath our feet extending on one side under an orchard of neatly pruned alders to the mountain's base, and on the other into the forest or along the shore. In the midst of the clearing stood the old man's cabin. He led us into it. One little room, neat and comfortable; two windows south and west with the warm sun streaming through them; a stove, a table by the window with dishes piled neatly on it; some shelves of food and one of books and papers; a bunk with gaily striped blankets; boots, guns, tools, tobacco-boxes; a ladder to the storeroom in the loft. And the old man himself: a Swede, short, round and sturdy, head bald as though with a priestly tonsure, high cheekbones and broad face, full lips, a sensitive small chin, — and his little eyes sparkled with good humor.

"Look, this is all mine," he was saying; "you can live here with me — with me and Nanny,"— for by this time not only had the milk goat Nanny entered but a whole family of foolish-faced Angoras, father, mother, and child, nosing among us or overturning what they could in search of food. He took us to the fox corral a few yards from the house. There were the blues in its far corner eying us askance. We saw the old goat cabin built of logs and were told of a newer one, an unused one down the shore and deeper in the woods.

"But come," he said with pride, "I show you my location notice. I have done it all in the proper way and I will get my title from Washington soon. I have staked fifty acres. It is all described in the notice I have posted; and I would like to see anybody get that away from me."

By now we had reached the great spruce tree to whose trunk he had affixed a sort of roofed tablet or shrine to house the precious document. But, ah look! the tablet was bare! only that from a small nail in it hung a torn shred of paper.

"Billy, Nanny!" roared the old man in irritation and mock rage; and he shook his first at the foolish-looking culprits who regarded us this time, wisely, from a distance. "And now come to the lake!"

We went down an avenue through the tall spruce trees. The sun flecked our path and fired here and there a flame-colored mushroom that blazed in the forest gloom. Right and left we saw deep vistas, and straight ahead a broad and sunlit space, a valley between hills; there lay the lake. It was a real lake, broad and clean, of many acres in extent, and the whole mountain side lay mirrored in it with the purple zenith sky at our feet. Not a breath disturbed the surface, not a ripple broke along the pebbly beach; it was dead silent here but for maybe the far off sound of surf, and without motion but that high aloft two eagles soared with steady wing searching the mountain tops. Ah, supreme moment! These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.

Time pressed and we turned back. "Show us that other cabin, we must go."

The old man took us by a short cut to the cabin he had spoken of. It stood in a darkly shadowed clearing, a log cabin of ample size with a small doorway that you stooped to enter. Inside was dark but for a little opening to the west. There were the stalls for goats, coops for some Belgian hares he had once kept, a tin whirligig for squirrels hanging in the gable peak, and under foot a shaky floor covered with filth.

But I knew what that cabin might become. I saw it once and said, "This is the place we'll live." And then returning to our boat we shook hands on this great, quick finding of the thing we'd sought and, since we could not stay then as he begged us to, promised a speedy return with all our household goods. "Olson's my name," he said, "I need you here. We'll make a go of it."

The south wind had risen and the white caps flew. We crossed the bay pulling lustily for very joy. Reaching the other shore we saw, too late, crossing the bay in search of us the small white sail of the party that had brought us part way from the town. So we turned and followed them until at last we met to their relief and the great satisfaction of our tired arms.

CHAPTER 2

ARRIVAL

Our journal of Fox Island begins properly with the day of our final coming there, Wednesday, August the twenty-eighth, 1918.

At nine o'clock in the morning of that day we slid our dory into the water from the beach at Seward, clamped our little patched-up three and one half horse-power Evinrude motor in the stern, and commenced our loading.

Since the main part of such a story, as in all these following pages we shall have to tell, must consist in the detailing of the innumerable little commonplaces of our daily lives, we shall begin at once with a list, as far as we have record of it, of all we carried with us. It follows:

1 Yukon stove 10 lbs. rice
4 lengths stovepipe 5 lbs. barley
1 broom 10 lbs. cornmeal
1 bread pan 10 lbs. rolled oats
1 wash basin 10 lbs. hominy
1 bean pot 10 lbs. farina
1 mixing bow l10 lbs. sugar Turpentine 50 lbs. flour Linseed oil 2 packages bran Nails, etc. 6 cans cocoa
10 gals. gasoline 1 lb. tea
1 case milk 10 lbs. lima beans
8 lbs. chocolate 10 lbs. white beans
1 gal. sirup 5 lbs. Mexican beans
1 gal. cooking oil 10 lbs. spaghetti
1 piece bacon 12 cans tomatoes
2 cans dried eggs 100 lbs. potatoes
2 cans baked beans 10 lbs. dried peas
6 lemons 5 lbs. salt
2 packages pancake flour 1 gal. peanut butter
10 lbs. whole wheat flour 1 gal. marmalade
6 Ivory Soap Pepper
3 laundry soap Yeast
6 agate cups 5 lbs. prunes
4 agate plates 5 lbs. apricots
4 agate bowls 5 lbs. carrots
2 agate dishes 10 lbs. onions
4 pots 4 cans soup
2 pillows 12 candles
2 comforters 2 Dutch Cleanser
1 roll building paper Matches
1 frying pan 1 tea kettle
3 bread tins Pails, etc.

Also there were a heavy trunk containing books, paints, etc., one duffel bag, one suit case, and a few other things. And when these were stowed away in the dory there was little room for ourselves. However, at ten o'clock we cast off and started for Fox Island with the little motor running beautifully.

It lasted for three miles when at once, with a bang and a whir, the motor raced, and the boat stood motionless on the calm gray water. Through the fog we could just discern the cabin of a fisherman on the nearest point of shore — perhaps a mile distant. We rowed there as best we could, seated somehow atop our household goods; we unloaded our useless motor, our gasoline, and our batteries, cleared a little space in the boat for ourselves to man the oars, and in a miserable drizzling rain, pushed off for a long, long pull to the island. By too literal a following of directions I lengthened the remainder of the course to twelve miles, and that we rowed, I don't know how, in four hours and a half. Fortunately the water was as calm as could be. Rockwell was a revelation to me. With scarcely a rest he pulled at the heavy oars that at first he had hardly understood to manage; and when we reached the island he was hilarious with good spirits.

We unloaded with the help of Olson — whom by the way we must introduce at some length — and stowed our goods in his house and shed. We cooked our supper on his stove and slept that night and the next on his floor; and then, having our own quarters by that time in passable shape, quit his friendly roof for the most hospitable, kindly, and altogether comfortable roof in the world, our own.

Olson is about sixty-five years of age. He's a pioneer of Alaska and knows the country from one end to the other. He has prospected for gold on the Yukon, he was at Nome with the first rush there, he has trapped along a thousand miles of coast; and now, ever unsuccessful and still enterprising, he is the proprietor of two pairs of blue foxes — in corrals — and four goats. He's a kind-hearted, genial old man with a vast store of knowledge and true wisdom.

The map shows our Fox Island estate. Our cabin was built as a shelter for Angora goats somewhat over a year ago. It is a roughly built log structure of about fourteen by seventeen feet, inside dimensions, and was quite dark but for the small door and a two by two feet opening on the western side. We went to work upon it the morning following our arrival and in two days, as has been told, made it a fit place to live in but by no means the luxurious home that it was in our mind to make. Our cabin today is the product of weeks' more labor. To describe it is to account for our time almost to the beginning of the detailed days of this diary.

Tread first upon a broad, plank doorstep, the hatch of some ill-fated vessel — the sea's gift to us of a front veranda; stoop your head to four feet six inches and, drawing the latchstring, enter. Before you at the south end of the somber, log interior is a mullioned window willing to admit more light than can penetrate the forest beyond. Before it is a fixed work table littered with papers, pencils, paints, and brushes. On each long side of the cabin is a shelf the eaves' height, five feet from the floor. The right-hand one is packed with foods in sacks and tins and boxes, the left-hand shelf holds clothes and toys, paints and a flute, and at the far corner built to the floor in orthodox bookcase fashion, a library.

We may glance at the books. There are:

"Indian Essays." Coomaraswamy "The Home Medical Library"
"Griechische Vasen" "Poems." Blake
"The Water Babies" "Life of Blake." Gilchrist
"Robinson Crusoe" "The Tree Dwellers," "The Cave
"The Prose Edda" Dwellers," "The Sea People," etc.
"Anson's Voyages" "Pacific Coast Tide Table"
"A Literary History of Ireland." "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
Douglas Hyde "The Book of the Ocean"
"The Crock of Gold" "Albrecht Dürer" (A Short Biography)
"The Iliad" "The Odyssey"
"Fairy Tales." Andersen "Wilhelm Meister"
"The Oxford Book of English Verse" "In Northern Mists." Nansen

In the center of the right-hand wall is a small low window and beneath it the dining table. Right at the door where we stand, to our left, is the sheet-iron Yukon stove and behind it another food-laden shelf. A new floor of broad unplaned boards is under our feet, a wooden platform — it is a bed — stands in the left-hand corner by the stove. Clothes hang under the shelves; pots and pans upon the wall, snowshoes and saws; a rack for plates in one place, a cupboard for potatoes and turnips behind the door — the cellar it may be called; the trunk for a seat, boxes for chairs, one stool for style; axes here and boots innumerable there, and we have, I think, all that the eye can take in of this adventurers' home!

Trees stood thick about our cabin when we first came there; and between it and the shore a dense and continuous thicket of large alders and sapling spruces. Day by day we cleared the ground; cutting avenues and vistas; then, though contented at first with these, enlarging them until they merged, and the sun began to shine about the cabin. It grew brighter then and drier, — nonsense! am I mistaking the daylight for the sun? I can remember but one or two fair days in all the three weeks of our first stay on the island.

For a true record of this matter Olson's diary shall be copied into these pages. It follows in full with his own phonetic spelling as leaven.

Sunday, Aug. 25th. — Wary fin Day. over tu Hump Bay got 2 salmon an artist cam ar to Day and going to seward efter his outfit and ar going to sta Hear this Winter in the new Cabbin.

Wed. 28th. — Drisly rain and cold. Mr. Kint and is son arivd from seward this afternoon. goats out all night.

Thurs. 29th. — goats cam ome — 12:30 P. M. Mr. Kint Working on the Cabbin fixing at up. Drisly rain all night and all day.

Fri. 30th. — Wary fin day and the goats vant for the montane igan. Help putting Windoes i to the Cabbin.

Sat. 31st. — Foggy day. Big steamer going to seward.

September

Sun. 1st. — Mead a trip around the island. Cloudy Day.

M. 2. — Big rainstorm from the S. E. goats all in the stabel.

T. 3. — Drisly rain all Day.

W. 4. — going to seward.

T. 5. — Came Home 1 P. M.

F. 6. — Drisly rain and Calm Wather.

S. 7. — S. E. rainstorm.

Sun. 8. — Big S. E. rainstorm.

M. 9. — Big S. E. rainstorm.

T.10. — Big S. E. rainstorm.

W. 11. — first Colld night this fall. Clear Calm Day.

T. 12. — Clowdy and Calm. Tug and Barg going West.

F. 13. — Steamer from the Sought 5.30 P. M. Drisly rain and Calm.

S. 14. — raining Wary Hard. the litly angora queen ar in Hit this morning. Fraet steamer from West going to Seward.

Sun. 15. — raining Wary Hard all Day. the goats ar in the cabbin all Day sought Est storm.

M. 16. — S. E. rainstorm.

T. 17. — raining all Day. North Est storm With Caps and Wullys all over.

W. 18. — Wary fear day. Mr. Kint and the Boy vant to seward this morning.

T. 19. — raining heard all day steamer from West going to seward 4 P. M.

F. 20 — raining heard all Day.

S. 21. — Wary rof rainstorm from Soght Est. Wullys all over.

Sun. 22. — Steamer from West going to Seward 2 P. M. the tied vary Hie Comes clear up in the gras and the surf ar Stiring up all the Driftwood along the shore. raining lik Hell.

M. 23. — raining all Day.

T. 24. — Snow on top of the mountins on the maenland a tre mastid skuner from West going to Seward. toed by som gassboth raining to Day egan. Mr. Kint and son got ome to the island this Evening.

September Fourteenth

I stopped writing, for the fire had almost gone out and the cold wind blew in from two dozen great crevices in the walls. The best of log cabins need recalking, I am told, once a year, and mine, roughly built as it is, needs it now in the worst way. Some openings are four or five inches wide by two feet long. We've gathered a great quantity of moss for calking, but it has rained so persistently that it cannot dry out to be fit for use.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Wilderness"
by .
Copyright © 1996 Wesleyan University Press.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustration
I. Foreword
II. Preface
III. Second Preface
IV. Third Preface
V. Introduction to Alaska Drawings
VI. Discovery
1. Arrival
2. Chores
3. Winter
4. Waiting
5. Excursion
6. Home
7. Christmas
8. New Year
9. Olson!
10. Twilight
11. The Mad Hermit

Editorial Reviews

"Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism popularity has so much of his work been available to the public."—Scott Ferris, Smithsonian

"Twenty-nine years after his death, [Rockwell] Kent has returned with a vengeance. Not since the height of his pre-McCarthyism popularity has so much of his work been available to the public."—Scott Ferris, Smithsonian

"Conservationists and ecologists should rejoice at the reappearance of this splendid diary telling of the winter of 1918 - 1919, during which the late Rockwell Kent and his 9-year-old son exulted in the beauties of Alaska's remote Fox Island. Kent's strong woodcuts and sketches perfectly complement an unaffected text that tells in an authentic and most effective way of unspoiled nature in all its glory . . . This book has considerable merit as an account of rugged life in Alaska, as a paean to the glories of nature, and as a record of Kent's graphic work."—Library Journal

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